Lafayette, The Indigenous

Main Street is by far the most charming and walkable street in downtown Lafayette. It's a street lined with curiosity shops, restaurants, bars, apartment buildings, and during Oktoberfest, wrestling rings for the mentally and physically impaired. Although it would seem that midget wrestling stands out as the chief attraction of Oktoberfest, the wrestling ring is actually in competition with several eating contests (bacon, hot dogs, corn) and cover bands. Luckily, the town staggered the times for the wrestling matches and the eating contests so theoretically you can participate in three different eating contests, depending on how disgusting you are, and still catch some disabled wrestling.

Now midget wrestling and bacon eating contests are riveting curiosities, but I found my attention captured, for the most part, by the indigenous of Lafayette surrounding, and I mean surrounding, the spectacles. Of course, some students from Purdue had made the trek across the river to witness the sights, but the bulk of people, and I mean bulk, were indigenous, who can be identified by certain distinct features, most notably size, apparel, and gait. In general, the indigenous prefer to have three or more chins, wear sweat suits of primary colors to accentuate their shape (mainly pear, but also pumpkin), and lumber about town bandy-legged and belly-out. Of course, there are variations on this general theme, some alternate colors of sweatshirts and sweatpants, sporting red or grey sweatshirts tucked into orange sweatpants tucked, in turn, into an unknown brand of hi-top shoe, and I have also seen them display Hawaiian shirts with jams (still in vogue in Lafayette) and other articles of clothing that cater to those of the oversized persuasion. During Oktoberfest, one might find them lumped up and down Main Steet, clutching bratwurst or hamburgers, and frequently both at once, washing it all down with some mead-like beverage, supplied by the local brewery on Main and Sixth St. I was a little hungry and thirsty myself, so I decided to hop in for a taste of the local cuisine.

The Lafayette Brewing Company is a large dimly lit mess hall that offers a variety of ales and food pairings (mainly burgers, but beer nuggets and wilted salads as well). Although the facade of the brewery is windowed, no light comes into the main dark-wooded, dusty room. In fact, it seems that the dank wood siphons in whatever sunlight attempts to shine in, and as you walk in you experience a little of your own soul sapped by the gloomy room. There are no flowers and few vegetables in the place, on account of this phenomenon, as they would wilt and die upon entry. I sat at a table and ordered the 'Black 'n Bleu Steak Caesar' along with the 'Tippecanone Common Ale' [sic]. After five minutes, the server dropped a pint of some cloudy liquid in front of me, and after thirty, a platter of browned iceberg lettuce.

There are certain kinds of intoxication that correspond to certain kinds of liquors: there is a mean whisky drunk, a jazzy gin drunk, a sensuous wine drunk, and there is also a Lafayette Brewing Company drunk. The beers are cloudy on account of the yeast sediment floating in the pint, and the brews are imbalanced and unintegrated as well. Perhaps because of this, the pints hit you sideways, and after only a couple you feel like you've just drunk two forty-ounces of malt liquor and smoked a blunt of bad marijuana. I looked around and noticed that everyone around me looked lost, as if they had came into the brewery thirty years ago and had forgotten what happened to their life since. Realizing I had inadvertently stumbled into the land of the Lotus-eaters, I immediately requested the check, and realizing that it would never come, I threw some cash on the table and promptly shoved my way through some zombies toward the exit.

Don't get me wrong, I like a bad meal as much as the next person. But in the Lafayette Brewing Company, you receive a depressing meal in a depressing restaurant, and so behind the depression there's just more depression. William Thackeray once wrote, "Despair is perfectly compatible with a good meal, I assure you," but let me assure you that despair is also perfectly compatible with a despairing meal. Whenever you see people eating mediocre meals, no one is talking, just like people walking out of mediocre movies are never talking. There's nothing to say about the mediocre. But the bad, one can always talk and tell stories about the bad, bad meals or a bad movies. In fact, sometimes a bad meal or movie is to be preferred over a good one; I, for one, am always excited to conversation when enjoying a bad meal, ringing up all terrible details that contribute to the badness. But a depressing or despairing meal, no one should have to suffer through that. I ascended the pit and graduated into the warming sun, and it seemed like the first breath of high-fructose corn-syrup factory air that I had ever smelt.

I wanted to get as far away from the Brew pub as quickly as I could, but I felt that I was drawing the attention of some of the zombie-lost lumps outside, and then it dawned on me that I was actually running. By the time I slowed down, I found myself on Third Street near the river, in front of a sports bar named Chumley's. I wanted to get the bad taste of the LBC out of my mouth, so I decided to hop in for one of the hundred beers they boast on tap, or one of the fifty in bottles.

I sat down at a table among the Indiana Colts jerseyed crowd standing around me, and when the small waitress finally squeezed through several large wobbling bodies, I ordered a glass of water and a favorite dubbel boch of mine. She returned, emerging this time from underneath two thick legs behind me, with an empty glass and uncapped bottle of the dubbel boch. After the run, I was hoping for some water, but I didn't want to trouble her and wasn't exactly sure what kind of acrobatics she would have to perform to fetch the forgotten water anyway, so I just poured the beer and took a sip of what tasted like nail polish. I sat there for awhile and imagined simply walking out, but I didn't let the increasingly disgusting taste in my mouth dictate my deliberations. So instead, I walked toward her with the skunked beer and informed her that it was bad. She confessed to me that she couldn't offer me a refund without having to talk to her manager, and further confessed that he was an asshole and that she was afraid of him, and so I offered to let him know the beer was skunked myself.

A man completely clad in Hurley attire approached me and asked me if 'I was the man with the beer'. I looked around and noticed that everyone in the bar beside the waitstaff was a man and that all those men had beer, and then replied, "yes, the bad beer. But I'm not upset, I'd just like a different beer please, perhaps an Indiana beer you might suggest to me." He told me that I could, in fact, lucky for me, order another beer, but that I would be charged for the dubbel boch and the additional beer as well. I gestured the glass of ethyl acetate toward him and told him that the beer was skunked, that it tasted of nail polish and tin afterwards, at which point he smelt it, contorted his face, and in all sincerity looked at me and told me that the beer was good. I stared confusedly at him for an vague period of time, certain that I had been thrust into a world of unknown dimension. I decided to imagine that our exchange hadn't happened, and told him, once again, that the beer was bad, at which point he presented me with the following argument: "This beer can't be bad, we get it in all the time."

I thought several thoughts at once; I wondered if he had ever heard of a non sequitur, if he had engaged in a cost/benefit analysis and decided that the meager cost to Chumley's bar incurred by taking the beer back especially outweighed the clearly more lucrative consequence of my continued patronage, if I had seen him in the wrestling ring just earlier that day, he seemed physically able, but mentally...? In any case, one thing was certain, I did not understand the logic of Lafayette, so I handed him six dollars and walked out of the vomit plastered joint, turned the corner, and walked into a classier looking pub called The Black Sparrow.

At last, I felt I had finally landed at a decent drinking fountain. The Black Sparrow is a well furnished and kept bar with hipster clientele and a cabaret atmosphere. I plopped down at a bar stool, ordered from an attractive tap list, and enjoyed a pint of Indiana made Bell's Two Hearted Ale. I quickly finished the satisfying pint, de-escalated, and took in my new environs, watching people dart from circle to circle, cackle, and couple off upstairs. But as I was eavesdropping on the conversation of neighboring stools and tables, I suddenly had a strange realization: everybody in the Black Sparrow genuinely believes they're in New York. They refer to the local Fifth and Sixth Streets, which intersect Main Street, as 5th and 6th Aves., and their conversation flitted between talking about upcoming shows of bands that I had never heard of. As far as I know, Lafayette lamentably does not have a proper music venue, and neither does West Lafayette. But further eavesdropping clued me into another facet of this pub, namely, at night they shuffle around some tables and cramp a local garage band into a corner of the pub, and the clientele actually consisted almost entirely of members of the different local garage bands talking about their upcoming shows. I noticed another couple walking upstairs, and so I decided to see if there was a view of the town from an upstairs window, but as I followed a couple up some stairs, the bar staff told me to come back down, while the couple calmly continued their amorous ascent. All night, couples would go upstairs for half an hour and come back down, rosy-cheeked and exhausted. Later, I would find out that the owner of the Black Sparrow is also the owner of a smoke-house and Chances Are, the town strip club next to Carpetland, and I wondered if he might also be a pimp, given as he already managed beef, strippers, and liquor. In any case, I am not a musician myself, and neither could I convince myself that I was nor that I was in New York or any other city for that matter, and so it was clear I didn't belong to the theatre of the Black Sparrow. So, my mouth wet and my belly full of lettuce, I decided to finally make my way across the river, like a salmon, to West Lafayette and Purdue University.